How Print Celebrated Its Ellie Win

Last Thursday, visual culture and design magazine Print triumphed over the likes of Metropolis and Aperture to win the National Magazine Award for general excellence in the under 100,000 circulation category. On the occasion of the bimonthly magazine’s tenth nomination and its fourth win, the American Society of Magazine Editors lauded Print‘s “expansive view of its subject, its relentless curiosity, and its determination to look at design not in a vacuum but as a crucial gateway to popular culture, the environment, even politics.”

How did the Print team celebrate its win? “After the show was over at Jazz at Lincoln Center, we collapsed at the bar next door at the Mandarin Oriental,” says editor-in-chief Joyce Rutter Kaye (pictured above, with outgoing ASME president Cindi Leive), who adds that there was much giggling at the sight of associate editor James Gaddy‘s onscreen appearance during the awards show. “He was the cover model for our March/April 2007 New Visual Artists issue, which was projected about two stories tall in a spinning graphic,” adds Kaye.

As for the spiderlike award itself, it has already had some adventures of its own. After joining Kaye in a cab ride home to Brooklyn last Thursday, Print‘s Ellie traveled by tote bag to Park Slope’s PS 321, “where it journeyed through the halls and rested beneath a third-grade desk during ‘Parents as Learning Partners’ time, going completely unnoticed despite the high concentration of media-employed parents in the building,” Kaye tells us. “It then took a Q train ride to the office where it happily joined our other three Ellies on top of our set of bookshelves.” Now it’s now back to business as usual at Print as the staff closes the August issue and judges the Regional Design annual. But the memories are still fresh. Adds Kaye, “I still have an unwashed champagne glass sitting on my desk from the pre-Ellie celebration in the office Thursday night.”

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